Technologies in various streams are evolving rapidly, and so are the applications based upon them in each and every business sector. Marketing is no exception to this. Across the globe, marketers have been researching and finding newer ways to connect with their customers more effectively and boost sales growth. And now, data intelligence is the latest thing to be added to the bouquet of technologies that are being leveraged by marketers worldwide to excel in their efforts. Let’s look at how it is happening and the benefits it is yielding to them.
Data outsmarts experience and intuition
Slowly yet steadily, marketing experts across the globe have realized the fact that data-driven analyses and insights are more helpful to them in developing better marketing strategies than direct experience and intuitive inferences.
A “majority of executives around the world – 94% – say management of their company is prepared to make significant decisions about the strategic direction of their business, but barely one-third relied primarily on data and analytics when they made their last big decision”, suggested business research conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers in the year 2014.
But still, things had begun changing considerably by the time. Among the executives from highly data-driven companies, 43% reported significant improvements in decision-making over the two years prior to the time this research was published.
As an impact of these expert studies and observations, more and more enterprises have now started taking data-driven insights more seriously than their executives’ legacy experience-based intuitive suggestions.
Data intelligence helps marketers connect with customers
The primary step in marketing activities for any enterprise in any sector is establishing a connection with its customers. Data intelligence necessitates building and maintaining seamless and bankable connectivity with your customers through various technical means.
For example, a pizza joint might wish to precisely recognize the most appropriate timings for its potential customers to be approached with a lucrative discount offer on its pizza variants. By duly analyzing the data pertaining to smartphone and web usage patterns of its existing and potential customers the pizza joint may zero in on a specific time frame for issuing push notifications to the customers whenever they chance to pass by any of their outlets joint during the same.
Industry results suggest such steps have proven to be considerably helpful for food and beverage enterprises in seeing a high surge in orders during those specific time intervals.
Data gathering and analysis for better marketing
After finalizing a sound work-through for establishing connectivity with your customers, the next logical steps in enhancing your marketing efforts with the help of data are data gathering and analysis of the data thus accumulated.
For gathering the data, entry and exit points of the customers need to be taken into account, apart from observing their behavioral patterns while making a purchase. For example, in a retail departmental store, customers’ arrival and sales activities may be tracked electronically through Point of Sale or ‘PoS’ solutions.
Further, incorporating smartphone apps enabled with GPS tracking may make things even more transparent for marketers to analyze. It will help in accurately monitoring how they move about the store and purchase their desired products.
Finally, the accumulated data needs to be analyzed with the help of cutting-edge Data Analytics and Visualization solutions, to give a deeper and clearer picture about how those customers may be encouraged to make their purchases more frequently and abundantly in future. Various exclusive schemes and offers may be designed for them, which may further be customized by them as per their choices and tastes.
According to industry experts, customers of the mobile age respond well to hyper-targeting and having experiences specifically tailored to them and user data facilitates this, making it easier for businesses to understand their customers and develop better interactions with them. Also, they suggest that small businesses using customer data to personalize experiences are better positioned to strengthen their customer bases and build brand loyalty.